The present invention relates to a device and a method in particular for use in the manufacture of fiber-reinforced components.
Components made of composite fiber materials are being used to an increasing extent in diverse technical areas, such as in machinery, systems, and in the manufacture of vehicles, since components of this type have weight advantages in particular. Fiber-reinforced components may contain carbon fibers, glass fibers, or other known reinforcing materials as the reinforcing material, which are wound as rovings or fiber bundles around appropriate cores, or which are draped in the form of fiber strands or, in particular, fibrous woven fabric mats, onto appropriately shaped mould cores in order to manufacture the desired component shape.
It is possible to use “prepregs” or dry fiber woven fabrics which are subsequently coated or filled with a resin which is used as a matrix material. For example, a mould may be closed and a vacuum may then be applied to the mould, thereby suctioning liquid resin into the interior of the mould, where it saturates the fibrous woven mats present there, so that, after hardening, the desired component which is composed of a fiber-reinforced plastic is available. Duroplastic and thermoplastic materials, for example, are suitable for use as matrix materials.
The disadvantage of the known devices and methods for manufacturing fiber-reinforced components is the amount of manual effort that is required since the fiber layers often must be applied to the mould individually by hand.
DE 10 2006 046 624 A1 made known a device and a method for transporting objects, such as limp components in particular such as carbon fiber mats or the like, in the case of which several carbon fiber mats are gripped in succession in a form-appropriate manner and transported to a mould core, onto which they are placed.
This known state of the art simplifies the manufacture of fiber-reinforced components since the individual fibrous woven fabric layers are transported automatically. Despite the fact that the individual fibrous woven fabric layers are placed automatically, a large number of manual steps is still required to manufacture fiber-reinforced components.